David Moyes felt West Ham United’s fighting qualities kept them in the contest at Arsenal on Wednesday evening, yet ultimately they were unable to reach their high standards in suffering a 2-0 defeat to the Gunners.
Gabriel Martinelli opened the scoring early in the second half, before Vladimír Coufal was handed a second yellow card when he was judged to have fouled Alexandre Lacazette in the box with 20 minutes to go.
Łukasz Fabiański saved Lacazette’s spot kick to keep Arsenal honest and the game was still in the balance until Emile Smith Rowe settled it on the counter attack with three minutes to go.
But the manager conceded that despite his team’s spirit, they ultimately did not deserve to take anything back to east London.
We battled hard but didn’t reach our standards.
I didn’t think much of the game, to be honest. I didn’t enjoy our performance, but I did think we tried to stay resilient and stick at it.
We had some good defending when we needed to and our goalkeeper played very well for us and saved a great penalty.
So there were some things about it that were okay but overall we weren’t at the races. We’re probably not in a good enough moment [right now] and Arsenal are in a pretty good place. It wasn’t our night.
We did hang in there and you need to do that sometimes at places like this.
We kept them at bay for 45 minutes and we had to. That’s part of football – we’re still improving and there are quite a lot of expectations of where we should be and what we’re going to oo, but if you’ve not quite got a full squad and are not quite at it, these teams around you will beat you.
We’ve beaten a few teams around us too, so we’ve got to accept that there will be games that we lose.
We want the expectations to rise. I’m more disappointed that we couldn’t get a few things right. I was disappointed with the second goal tonight because I thought we gave it away really poorly when we were fighting hard with ten men to get back in the game.
I was happy to give young Harrison Ashby his Premier League debut late on.
We were going to put him on a bit earlier, but Mick (Michail Antonio) had gone to right back and I thought we might as well stick with that as a senior player, and he might give us something else because we’d have needed to either take off him or Jarrod [Bowen] at the time.
It gave us an option to keep Mick on the pitch so I stayed with that a bit longer.
It’s Norwich on Saturday and we need to be better.
I’m going to get the players ready to go because I want more and I want better. I think that we’ve got to get over it and find a way of getting improved performances because there are a few not playing at the levels they should be and I need to find a way of getting them above that.